Dipping a toe into the future

[rax]

So I've given in and dipped a toe into the future, which for most of you is probably the present. I'm planning to actually swim, or at least float. Help me out here:

• If you're using Twitter, I'm user raxvulpine; let me know so that I can follow you! (Or just follow me, and I'll notice and follow you back.)
• If you're using Facebook, you can friend me by clicking here. (I gave in because my UMass Boston friends are sufficiently from the future that they don't even use email.)
• Expect me to actually write up book reviews and such more frequently now.
• You can be my LinkedIn not-friend-because-that's-not-professional-enough-but-I-have-pink-hair-so-who-cares here. Thanks, jadia .
• Do I need to care about Dreamwidth?
• I've refreshed my personal website. I'm actually not embarrassed by it now! Yay!

What social technologies or mumbledy-whatevers am I missing? I'm going to be going to conferences and talking to people and want to be able to jump into networking with people and not seem like some sort of hopeless luddite. Eventually I will need to write some Javascript to automate the news bits but for now I think this is OK.

Comments

[rax.livejournal.com]

Facebook is totally manipulative and I am approaching it with my guard up, but it is actually the only way I can maintain friendships with a bunch of people I am not prepared to sacrifice solely based on their technology choices. :)

LJ: I guess I just don't see ads at all, between adblock in firefox and using w3m half the time anyway? Due to my own technology choices, that one doesn't affect me, though I can see how it would be frustrating. (And I agree on the "friend" thing.)

"Draining but worthwhile" is totally how I would describe my graduate studies. The creativity and involvement is wonderful, the tons of effort to what end is sometimes nervewracking. I mean, what do you do with an MA in English? (I don't particularly want to teach high school.) I'm considering a PhD at some point but that would be another 4-6 years of school and, well, that's lots of school. :) Sometimes I wish that "mastery of the subject" were something that felt attainable in my field at all...

[lhexa.livejournal.com]

I hope to stretch out my stay in graduate school as long as humanly possible. My favorite living philosopher, Stanley Cavell, spent thirteen years in graduate school. I consider that a good thing.

Okay, so I'm just about alone in that opinion, but I do love being a student.

Actually, "mastery of the subject" may be misleading way to put it. I can solve almost any freshman-level physics problem, plus explain the principles cogently and even teach them somewhat well. I can still do most sophomore-level problems, but odds are even whether I can actually teach them. And for anything of a higher level, the gaps in my knowledge prominently outclass what is present. I've mastered the basics, but may never master the entire core material, and can't reasonably expect to do more than master just one contemporary subfield... perhaps not even that.

Hopefully it'll be reassuring: yes, mastery is possible in the humanities, although you have to take the term "field" a bit narrowly. I have had the fortune of professors (most notably, one in writing/reading and one in philosophy) who demonstrated such mastery by their quality in teaching, insight and engagement. It's a shame those professors are never adequately appreciated. :P

It's a shame that physics has some big advantages in teaching over all of the humanities. In physics, a professor can (and should) set up a memorable demonstration of its principles in front of a class, a display of pyrotechnics, gadgetry and/or electricity. In the humanities, the teacher has to set up that same kind of demonstration inside the student's head.